Does Charlie Sykes Understand How the Right Lost Its Mind?

Austin, Texas, July 2, 2017. At a rally at the Texas state capitol, calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, Kevin Kamath, an anti-Trump protester, engages in a scuffle with Kyle Chapman, the president of the Texas Alt-Knights.
Photo: Dave Creaney/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s grotesqueries have presented the Republican Party’s intellectual class with a searing test of faith, somewhat akin to the way Marxist intellectuals experienced Stalin’s pact with Hitler or Khrushchev’s secret speech. Some of them have justified every one of the Great Leader’s lies, reversals, and authoritarian gestures. Others have begun to examine what about their party and their movement could have brought them to such a point.

How the Right Lost Its Mind, by Charlie Sykes, is the portrait of a conservative mind gripped with doubt. A conservative talk-radio host who found himself alienated from his audience and many of his comrades by the rise of Trump, Sykes reexamines his beliefs, and finds himself with more questions than answers.

Sykes approaches the dilemma of conservatism from the standpoint of its media wing, which he knows intimately, and many of his observations keenly identify the rot that set in in the right-wing echo chamber. Competition for audience share rewarded the most strident voices, many of which gained attention and loyalists by articulating racist or paranoid theories. The more sane conservatives declined to call them out “because, after all, we were friends,” confesses Sykes. “That proved to be a moral failure that lies at the heart of the conservative movement.”

Worse still, the conservative critique of the mainstream media went too far. Sykes earnestly believes that the mainstream media treats conservatives unfairly, but also believes it supplies real value and legitimate news. “We have succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media,” he laments.

Sykes even entertains the possibility that right-wing media have not helped the conservative cause at all. He notes that the Reagan administration, which saw the greatest advance of conservative politics, came at a time before Fox News or conservative talk radio existed. Reagan might not have had the room to forge compromises on issues like taxes and immigration had he lived with a conservative base perpetually mobilized to punish any ideological deviation.

Yet at many other points, Sykes seems so oblivious to the connection between Trump and the pathologies of conservatism that he is at a loss for how anybody on the right could have supported him at all. His book recounts a potted history of American conservatism that lionizes the movement’s rise from the margins — where it opposed mainstream Republicans like President Eisenhower and his “dime store New Deal” — to take the party over. In this account, which Sykes repeats, the original conservatives were utterly opposed to the strains of paranoia, racism, and authoritarianism that Trump embodies.

Sykes’s model is William F. Buckley, the widely acknowledged founder of modern conservatism. Sykes concedes that Buckley initially supported segregation and white supremacy, but “moderated his views and came to regret his stance on civil rights.” Buckley’s “excommunication” of the Birchers — the far-right group whose delusions included the belief that Eisenhower was a conscious and dedicated Communist spy and that fluoridated water was a red plot to weaken the citizenry — is the foundation of his worldview, and the lesson to which modern anti-Trump conservatives must turn.

But Buckley’s actual history is less heroic than Sykes realizes. As Alvin Felzenberg showed in National Review (no less), Buckley refused to excommunicate the Birchers outright, because he needed their subscriptions. Instead, he trod a careful line, gently (though in progressively stiffer terms) denouncing John Birch Society president Robert Welch’s statements while embracing the Birchers themselves. His seminal anti-Welch editorial “closed with the hope that the JBS would reject Welch’s trajectory and thrive,” recounts Felzenberg. And even then, Buckley “tried to retain a façade of cordial relations with the man he had denounced,” sending polite letters to Welch offering to renew his free subscription and good wishes. Buckley’s careful handling of the Birchers was not a counterpoint to the modern GOP’s treatment of the Trumpian fringe, but a precursor.

It is true that Buckley gave up his support for de jure segregation after Congress had outlawed it. But if he had learned any moral lessons, they were not apparent two decades later when Buckley continued to defend the Apartheid government in South Africa. Buckley did not merely defend South Africa on strategic anti-communist grounds, but embraced the white minority’s right to rule undemocratically. “President Botha of South Africa is incontestably right in saying in effect that he was not elected leader of his government in order to preside over the liquidation of the South Africa he was elected to govern,” he wrote in 1985. “One-man one-vote is a fanatical abstraction of self government that not even the United States tolerates institutionally.”

Buckley was a political realist. He might not have defended authoritarianism or white supremacy after they had suffered an irrevocable defeat. But nothing in his political makeup enabled him to support progressive egalitarian reform until it had become a fait accompli. The conservative dogma he helped to implant as the official policy of the Republican Party was unbending.

Sykes also takes the premise that the mainstream media is hopelessly biased against conservatives and Republicans as so manifest, he hardly bothers to demonstrate it. He holds up as evidence of bias truth-ratings from the fact-checking site Politifact, noting incredulously that Republicans were deemed to have spoken untruths at a higher rate than Democrats, even before Trump came along. Sykes can imagine no explanation for this other than bias.

But what about the possibility that Republicans say more untrue things because they have a friendly media ecosystem that allows them to do so? In their daily lives, Democratic politicians may not have more honest character than their Republican counterparts. But Democrats know that if they utter blatant falsehoods, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and so on are likely to call them out on it, and their own supporters (who draw from those outlets for news) will think less of them. Republicans have no such constraint. The GOP voting base, as Sykes has noted, relies almost entirely on conservative media, which do not even attempt to follow the principle of journalistic objectivity.

Whatever failing Sykes attributes to the liberal media, he surely recognizes that they have no parallel in the blatant propaganda of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. The mainstream media is at least trying to be fair, and even if its errors don’t balance out perfectly, they do run both ways. A week before the 2016 election, a New York Timesheadline announced, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” One can only imagine what Sykes would make of it had the paper committed an error of equal magnitude against a Republican nominee.

The large historical fact Sykes cannot bring himself to acknowledge is the connection between Trump and the rigidity of conservative dogma. One manifestation of the link passes briefly into his field of vision, and then disappears. “It is harder to explain why free markets create wealth than it is to pander to workers who have been displaced by global competition,” he writes. “It is an uphill fight to persuade workers that the minimum wage is not in their interest.” (The list could go on if he wanted: It is also hard to talk voters into supporting cuts to extremely popular social insurance programs or tax cuts for very rich people.)

Sykes goes on from here to argue that these unpopular principles must be defended nonetheless. He might consider another way to read these facts. The Republican Party under Eisenhower reconciled itself to the popularity of the New Deal, and created an identity for itself that allowed for a positive vision for the role of the state. Right-of-center parties in other democracies have done the same. The United States is the only democracy with a major conservative party so extreme in its hostility to government that it rejects universal health insurance, climate science, or tax increases of any form at any time. And the GOP’s attraction to white racial grievance and authoritarianism is a direct result of being saddled with unpopular economic views.

Sykes concedes that many of his liberal readers are bound to be disappointed with the breadth of his critique. Indeed, liberals sometimes fall into the trap of demanding that Republican critics of Trump endorse every element of the Democratic platform. A rational, post-Trump party would surely stake out conservative ground on abortion and other social issues, foreign policy and the military, opposition to single-payer health insurance, and other questions. A more centrist GOP would not need to deflect every economic question by appealing to ethno-nationalism, nor would it be so easily panicked into supporting a Flight 93 strongman to stave off the terrifying nonwhite hordes.

Sykes proposes that conservatives can sharpen their thinking by opposing Trump, just as they did by opposing the moderation of Eisenhower. What if they tried emulating it, instead?

Promoted links by Taboola

THE FEED

28 mins ago

And yet we keep waiting

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”